InFocus to Bring Aadhaar-Based Smartphone With Iris Scanner That Will Aid Cashless Transactions

American-based InFocus launched a couple of smartphones this year, but couldn’t gain much hold in the Indian industry because of competition from Chinese players. The company is now betting on its iris recognition feature to launch a smartphone for a digital economy.

InFocus is going to launch an Aadhaar-enabled smartphone with an iris-scanner to authenticate biometrics. To be priced under Rs. 12,000, the smartphone will scan your eyes to confirm your Aadhaar credentials.

The Government has taken the initiative to promote pinless and cashless transactions through Aadhaar cards. This feature in InFocus’ smartphone will allow you to make transactions solely by scanning your eyes before paying the merchant. In fact, once your Aadhaar is validated by scanning your iris, you can do all the things where Aadhaar is required.

Benefits of Aadhaar Verification for Government Process

An Aadhar Card is an essential document when it comes to KYC, verification, and identification purposes. It can be used for the following operations –

Acquisition of Passport

Opening Bank Accounts

Digital Life Certificate

Receipt of Monthly Pension

Jan Dhan Yojana

Disbursing Provident Fund

LPG Subsidy

For a cashless economy, using biometric technology and iris scans, people would soon be able to send and receive payments, in a closed ecosystem which would include your smartphone, Aadhaar card and bank account. This will not use any other digital wallet for transactions.

The Government is also pushing all smartphone manufacturers to have a thumb-based identity service(fingerprint scanner) or an iris-based identity service(iris-scanner), so that Aadhaar can be verified and used for simple transactions. There is a major overhaul expected in the next 5 years that will make all digital wallet and cards useless.

Will this method be successful?

InFocus claims that the smartphone will be able to scan the iris in almost all conditions, even under direct sunlight in under 2 seconds. Also this information will be encrypted by a UIDAI key so that there is no theft of identity.

The only problem will come when someone tries to use a fraudulent way of scanning the eyes and steal your identity. Iris scans, and even fingerprint scans, for that matter are not fraud-proof, and there is always some possibility of leakage.

Having said that, it is not very easy to do that, so your Aadhaar identity is safe with the Government and your smartphone. InFocus has not yet outed the features of the smartphone, but it will launch a new range of such phones in 2017.